OFFSTAGE: Taylor Swift on That Special Place in Hell

(CMT Offstage keeps a 24/7 watch on everything that’s happening with country music artists behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.)

I have to agree with Taylor Swift
and Katie Couric on this sentiment: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Couric shared that quote with Swift, who then shared it with Vanity Fair magazine
(she’s the April issue’s cover girl) when the talk turned to mean girls. Maybe that was on Swift’s mind when Amy Poehler and Tina Fey gently poked fun at her love life on the Golden Globe Awards. I doubt Swift really thinks Poehler and Fey are going to hell, but it’s good to see her shedding the Pollyanna archetype and fighting back a little. Other topics that bother her? The tabloid rumors about her long list of boyfriends. “The fact that there are slide shows of a dozen guys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with … it’s just kind of ridiculous,” she said. Being portrayed as a crazy ex-girlfriend is maddening, too. “For a female to write about her feelings and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated — a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way — that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist,” said Swift. And then the real estate thing. That really gets Swift going. “People say that about me, that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like — that’s a thing that I apparently do,” Swift says, sounding more than a little sarcastic. “If I like you, I will apparently buy up the real estate market just to freak you out so you leave me.”